Fix missing game icons in Steam for Linux

If there’s one thing that annoys me on my desktop it’s icons not showing up. Sadly this seems to be one thing that plagues a lot of games on Steam. Rather than write to Steam or the Game developers themselves I thought I would fix the game icons myself. Leave the devs developing!

It’s really quite easy to do and can easily be applied to any Steam game installed on your computer and it gives you the ability to “upgrade” any icons you’re not happy with. Remember this can be applied to almost any application installed on your computer – not just Steam games.

Step One:

First you need your game icon. You can get creative yourself or google away. I will use Torchlight II as the example here so a quick search reveals a nice range of icons to choose from. I have found deviant art is a great source of high quality fan made icons.

Step Two:

Once you’ve found an icon you are happy with save it somewhere on your computer (making sure that the icon you’ve downloaded is a png and has a transparent background, when you download icons from Deviant Art they usually are). Name it something sensible (mine is torchlight2.png) and then move it to ~/.local/share/icons (~ is your home user directory).

Step Three (the last one!):

Now you just need to set your new icon. First find the game you want to re-icon in your ~/.local/share/applications folder

Now open up a text editor (I use gedit) and drag your games app into the text editor, it will open up the file to reveal something like this:

All you need to do is change the Icon definition. All it needs to be is the name of the file (minus the extension – the .png) that you downloaded and moved to the icons directory in step two. Save the file and you’re done! Don’t worry if it doesn’t show up straight away – a simple logout and login will refresh it.

Simple as that, you’ve just learned how to fix missing game icons in Steam for Linux. Go you!